Remembering

It seems a lifetime since
Peter was at Mildert
studying History.

Peter has never forgotten
the immense support that
so many friends gave him
in the months and years after
his December 1982 car crash.
Though now registered blind
and therefore unable,
amongst other things,
to join the Army,
he has been able to enjoy
a successful career
focused on helping others.



From the Durham University Alumni newsletter, 25th June 2010. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Commatose

The Board is mindful
of the guidelines produced
by the Association of British Insurers
and the attention being given
to CSR issues
by investors and wider stakeholder communities.
The Board acknowledges
the commercial and ethical importance
of the development and maintenance
of a culture of continuous improvement
in CSR matters
as far as they are relevant to the Group's activities
and accepts that
the implementation of a system
for measuring and reporting
on key CSR indicators
may, over time, be appropriate.



Taken from Harvard International’s statement on Corporate Responsibility, 28th June 2010. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Sea State

Humber Thames Dover Wight
Portland Plymouth north Biscay
Variable 3 or 4. Smooth or slight.
Fair.

Moderate or good,
Occasionally poor later.



By Nathan Lechler, taken from the shipping forecast on 22nd June 2010.

Hepaticous

And then you're in an operating room,
Staring deep
Into a stellate smash of livid liver.

It oozes discontinuous destruction.
Fragments of hepatic mush are strewn
And coddled among clots of blood,
Stained with bile and mixed with stool.
The beauty of the enzyme pathways is nowhere to be seen;

Dr. Krebs is not in the building.
Weak indeed is the capsule holding it all in,
split apart like broiled bratwurst.
How little it takes!



By Jim, taken from Dr Schwab's blog, 8th October 2007.

Contractor's Code

Considerate
As far as possible, works
are to be carried out
in such a way that
noise and
dust are
kept to a minimum,
and at times which will minimise
the effect on
city workers,
residents and
visitors.

Clean
Footways and carriageways affected
by works are to be
kept in a
tidy and
safe condition.
Hoardings, scaffolds, warning lights
and other features are to be
kept
clean and
neat.

Care
All work will be carried out safely
and in such a way that it will
not inconvenience
pedestrians or
other road users.
Special care will be taken to make sure that
pedestrians with sight,
hearing or
mobility difficulties are
not inconvenienced or endangered
and that access is maintained for those
in wheelchairs or
pushing prams.

Co-operative
The main contractor is to ensure that
subcontractors,
suppliers and
others working on, or near the site,
maintain the standards of the Code of Practice.



By Huw, taken from a building site hoarding in Tower Hamlets, London, on the 5th June 2010.

Vivid

I am not sure why this summer seems so vivid,
with each day somehow more beautiful than the last.
I only know that is the way it feels. The days
are moving as if each hour is two, and every
detail – a salad, a bunch of sweet peas or box
of tiny broad beans – is somehow more rich than it
would normally be. It is as if the colours,
sounds and scents of summer have been turned up a notch.

Tiny broad beans so tender you could eat them pod
and all; sweet little peas (they love a drop of good
steady rain) and lettuces that have benefited
from the cooler mornings and evenings. I made a
bean sauce this week with a base of crisp purple
and white spring onions, broad beans and tarragon. I
gave it a backbone of cubed unsmoked bacon and
bound it with a little cream. I skinned the larger beans
but left the real babies in their paper-thin skins.

The early peaches are at last arriving from
France and Italy. I wait all spring for these fruits
with their rose-scented juice. It is rare to find them
perfectly ripe in the shops, so I make sure I
buy them a couple of days before I need them.
The old trick of putting them in a paper bag
with a ripe banana to speed up their ripening
works well, but they do very nicely just left out
for a day or two. But there is no need to squeeze
and prod. An unripe peach has virtually no smell;
a ripe one will tell you it is ready to eat.



From Nigel Slater's column in the Observer, 4 July 2010. The opening paragraph was perfectly dodecasyllabic (breaking into 12 syllable lines) so 'sort of' was removed from line 13 and 'I find' from line 25 to maintain the pattern. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Sawbones

I will reach in gently and caress the liver,
the stomach and spleen.
Slide over the top,
into the recesses,
curl the fingers enough to sense the texture,
the fullness.
The bowels move away and under,
and over the top as I direct my hand.
I can describe your kidneys now,
I’ve circled the top of your rectum,
held your uterus,
measured your ovaries between my fingers.
Part of you is gone at the moment,
but I’m here,
I know you now.
You trusted and let me in,
you opened your belly to me,
and I entered with force.
I’ll stay until it’s right.
It’s what I must do.
You think you’ll never touch me so
intimately as I’ve touched you.
But you have.
You have.



From a Surgeonsblog post published 7th October, 2006. Submitted by Marika Rose.

The Eye in Time

Keen lemon-yellow
Hurts the eye in time
As a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note
The ear.

Or white
Conveys a harmony of silence
Which works upon us negatively
Like many pauses in music
That break
Temporarily
The Mel-
-ody.



A Kandinsky quotation taken from 'Music and Jugendstil', Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1990. Submitted by Kate Guthrie.

The Death of Alden

Many of them are neither
in the army nor in war work.
Many have found this a golden
opportunity to make
money during a war boom---
by writing, by commercial photography,
through the movies, or by other
worthless activities---worthless
when compared with what
your brother Alden was doing.
These bastards let your brother die, Forry,
and did not lift a hand to help him.

I mean that literally. The war
in Europe would have been over
if all the slackers in this country
had been trying to help out---
would have been over before the date
on which your brother died.
The slackers are collectively
and personally responsible
for the death of Alden.
And a large percent of fans
are among those slackers.
Alden's blood is on their hands.



From a letter written by sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein to a dedicated fan (as reproduced on Letters of Note), 28th January 1945. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

By Saturn's Moons

An aurora, shining high above
the northern part of Saturn, moves
from the night side to the day
side of the planet … tall auroral
curtains, rapidly changing over
time when viewed at the limb, or edge,
of the planet's northern hemisphere.

A large cloud formation swirls
through the high northern latitudes
of Saturn near the top …

Appearing like eyes on a potato,
craters cover the dimly lit surface
of the moon Prometheus …

Cassini looks down on the clouds
in the upper atmosphere of Saturn,
just over the shoulder of the moon

Helene … Saturn's rings, made dark
in part as the planet casts its shadow
across them, cut a striking figure
before Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

The shadow of Saturn's largest moon darkens
a huge portion of the gas giant planet.

Titan's golden, smog-like atmosphere
and complex layered hazes appear
to Cassini as a luminous ring
around the planet-sized moon.

Saturn's moon Dione passes in front
of the larger moon Titan … Enceladus
continues to spew ice into space …

A closer view of a feature
on Enceladus called Baghdad Sulcus,
one of four tiger stripes that cross
Enceladus' south pole … Cassini

is on the night side of the moon,
viewing brightly-lit plumes
of ice being ejected from fissures
at Enceladus' south pole.

Saturn's moon Rhea looms near
its sibling moon Epimetheus …

Irregularly shaped Calypso is one
of two Trojan moons that travel
in the same orbit of the larger moon
Tethys, traveling ahead and behind.
Calypso's smooth surface does not appear
to retain the record of intense cratering
that most of Saturn's other moons possess.



Compiled from NASA's notes on photographs taken of Saturn's system by their spacecraft Cassini. The photos were collected at The Big Picture 21 May 2010. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

First Night

If you and I meet up
and have a fabulous evening,
I will try and match you,
for the rest of our relationship,
with my image of
that fabulous evening.

But you are all sorts of other things.
And when I find that I then
can’t match up the magic
of that fabulous bubbly first night
to our second night I become
depressed and disgruntled

and I start hating you.



By Rishi Dastidar, taken from an interview with Rupert Everett in the Metro, 15th June 2010.

Meet me in Johannesburg

Honduras, Algeria,
Germany, Nigeria,
USA, Slovenia,
Ivory Coast.

Denmark, Spain, Slovakia,
Ghana, France, South Africa,
Chile, Greece, Australia,
Japan, Mexico.

Cameroon and Uruguay,
Portugal and Paraguay,
Serbia and Italy,
Switzerland.

England and North Korea,
Holland and Argentina,
Brazil and South Korea,
New Zealand.



A cheeky not-exactly-found poem constructed from the 32 teams in the 2010 World Cup, plus conjunctions for scansion. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.